


Serenade

by Faemonic



Series: Songs of the Sunsets [3]
Category: Otherfaith Religion & Lore
Genre: Depression, F/F, Firmament, Murder, Poverty, Seashore, The feels tho, War, Wastes, Wild West, that is the only pun in this fic otherwise there is no joy, the Wastes - Freeform, there might be one other pun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-02
Updated: 2016-01-02
Packaged: 2018-05-10 17:09:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 8
Words: 8,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5594176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Faemonic/pseuds/Faemonic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to <em>Aubade</em>. The Firmament over the West might have not been a good idea. This is how it falls.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prisoners of War

**Author's Note:**

> For Reunion 2015.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter attributes Spivak pronouns to the Lightning Horse. 
> 
> So, I figured that Consent Culture is not a thing among the stars. While this might not read as too graphic, I did find myself taking frequent breaks while writing this chapter to just hug a pillow and/or rock back and forth to soothe the distress, so warning checkboxes are up.

The first wave of invaders wore plain white masks on their faces, shield-sized masks over their arms, and white plate armor with each plate patterned with a stain like a face. They swarmed the Firmament, the dome-shaped barrier between the lands of Western Faery and the skies above.

Princess Irene exited her palace to meet them and, with an imperious wave of her hand, cocooned them in tapestries of light so like the landscapes of North-East-Southern Faery that the soldiers hesitated in their confusion.

Their captain shouted, “Do not be deceived! We remain on the Firmament! Plunge your shields into the ground to rend the weave, as we’ve planned, and the princess will be unable to warn the King of our invasion.”

At that, the princess drew her gun and fired through the eyeholes of their masks. When the entire contubernium lay dead, she reloaded her gun and whistled for the lightning horse. Ey whisked her on eir back to the edge of the settlement of her principality, then reared up and neighed with apprehension. The princess beheld what had given her mighty warsteed pause: the spherical spacecrafts of what must have been myriad legions of stars.

She dismounted and turned the lightning horse away, and reached for the weave of voices that the Firmament granted all its denizens for one another as well as themselves for the land below. Irene discovered, to her dismay, that the lines of the weave lay silent and sundered.

Another tapestry of light, this time one of camouflage, she conjured and went forth by foot in search of one other fae.

The stars who lived upon the Firmament that were not soldiers, begged and wept as their masked brethren lashed them together and hauled them up the ramps and into the spacecrafts. Alas, it was only that which the seeing eye could witness that Irene could fool. She cast more illusions where she passed, to try to save the unmasked stars. The masked stars called out to one another, “We cannot proceed to recapture them all!” “This is the princess’ magic!” “Our contubernium has failed!” And they felt for their vanished spacecrafts, calling, “Here to the third!” “Here to the seventh!” And so on.

Irene herself only had so few bullets for so many soldiers, and the civilian stars had never learned to fight. Before, the stars would only alight upon the Firmament during the new moon, and would only capture stars who wished to return to the halls of the sky.

A pair of masked stars passed Irene, and one said to the other: “The twelfth caught one that insisted she wasn’t a star—that she’d been born in the West—but she had white hair and everything.”

Irene listened intently.

The other soldier stiffened and pulled away. “Have they been interbreeding? We can’t take them back home if they have.”

“Perish the thought! Her mind’s just been addled. They’ll say anything they think will convince us to let them stay…”

The other soldier seethed with relief and wondered, “Why would they want to stay here?”

The first soldier shrugged a shoulder and said, simply, “They’re wrong. That’s why we’re here, to fix it.”

Irene jogged through the settlement, listening for a call, “To the twelfth!” And, once she caught the call, she entered the spacecraft unseen.

The fae Lily Bell was easily lost in the serried pattern of faces framed by white hair, bodies all shackled to the inside of the spacecraft by the masked guard. Irene searched the crowd for her—shot the guard dead for bumping against her and then purposely trying to get in her way—the gunshot panicked the prisoners—

“Be still, all of you!” A familiar voice rang out. “It’s our princess in disguise!”

The prisoners seemed to calm, or panic in a different way, as Irene doffed her camouflage and knelt down to free Lily Bell.

“Us, too! Us, too!” They cried. An elderly star beside Lily Bell added, “They will keep us all in rooms of starfire and thorn if you let this ship return with us!”

Irene found herself unable even to reassure them that she would free them from their prisons once she had gathered an army—but she could not save them all now.

Before the stars knew that they would be so forsaken, Lily Bell screamed, “Behind you!”

The gunshot and shouting had drawn attention from outside. A masked star flew in from the entrance and flung a loop of rope around Irene before the princess could draw her gun. Irene twisted around to take one last, intent look at Lily Bell, and wrestled against the rope—seemingly for her gun holster, but Lily Bell saw Irene’s hand dip into the pocket next to it. Out flung something like a coin onto the ground. The masked star pulled Irene away and confiscated her gun, at which point Irene quit struggling. The other masked stars entered the hold and gathered around the body of the guard.

“To the first with that one,” one of the masked stars said of Irene. “We haven’t done half of what we set out to do. The King of the West will want to retaliate, and a valuable hostage will buy us more time.”

Unnoticed by the masked stars, Lily Bell clutched at the coin-sized saucer that had fallen from the princess’ pocket. This was the key to the West from the Firmament, she knew. She imagined that Irene’s expression had meant, _‘When you get the chance, fall home.’_

* * *

 

The spacecrafts drifted into the halls of the sky, and masked stars herded the civilians into holding cells. The word carried through the susurrus of those imprisoned in the twelfth sphere: _Lily Bell of the West remains among us._

One of their wardens came with a lash of sunbursts, demanding to know which one of them was not a star. A pair of quarreling stars each accused the other of being Lily Bell, and the warden hauled both of them away—ignoring Lily Bell herself, no matter how vehemently she cried that she was herself.

The eldest star to settle upon the Firmament, whose name was Sorrow, warned Lily Bell that the scavenging of aberrant stars would be worse than starfire and thorn for those who were not stars at all.

Later, an unmasked warden—a star named Sham—approached the prisoners and asked, in a conspiratorial whisper, after whichever one was Lily Bell.

“They took her away already,” Sorrow lied, and their fellow prisoner stars murmured in support of it.

“That isn’t true. The warden discovered their true names,” Sham said.

“In that case,” Sorrow said, “I am Lily Bell.”

“Lies again,” said another star, whose name was Complacency but she wanted to change it, “I am Lily Bell.”

“Lily Bell is my name,” insisted a large star named Guile.

Sham sighed and made a gesture of surrender. “I was only curious! I’m not important enough to be told to hunt her down, and nobody would listen to me if I found her.”

Lily Bell leaned out against the bars and asked Sham, “What is your purpose here, then?”

With a scratch of the head, Sham replied, “It’s not on purpose, per se, I’m trained and ordered and obey…I’m even a little sorry it must be this way…” And with a pull of a lever, walls fell outside the bars that began to siphon starfire with such a force that Complacency unraveled before Lily Bell’s eyes.

Lily Bell would have screamed, but the absence was so keen that it ate at the surface of her skin like burns, and tore at her body like teeth, and she knew it waited for her breath. With no escape but death, the imprisoned stars began to panic, and those who were in Lily Bell’s comity but a moment before then became a crushing jostle of bodies—turning on each other, with fangs and desperate thirst.

 

* * *

 

Meanwhile, the masked stars kept Irene in a room of white fire without thorn, tethered in place by precious fibers that shone and glinted in the blazing heat. This passed for civility among the stars.

She could overhear the apprehensive conversations of her captors. The legions that had prepared for an attack had been given new orders to capture any stars they could find, now that Irene’s mirages had faded and could not protect them. None of the civilian stars upon the Firmament had escaped into the West—they could not even find records of warning the West, in the little they could access from the weave—yet the King had amassed her armies.

Irene’s captors had spied from above, tried to make sense of what they had seen: a vast bird of fire clapped armor of the strangest manufacture upon the Clarene’s body, and she ascended to the Firmament with an explosion of golden fire. As this figure rocketed upwards, she shed her cloven feet and then her knees and then her legs. Two faery queens flew beside her: the Dierne, and the Azure Laetha. They surpassed the Firmament, leaving no room for entry behind them, and they were fast and fearlessly approaching the halls of the stars. How had they been warned? How could they have been warned?

The Lightning Horse, thought Irene with smug relief. The air around her rippled with a blue hue—she felt the exhaustion of her power, but only with that coolness could she almost bear the imprisonment. When the masked stars approached her with questions—how she had warned them, how strong were the armies of the West, if the Clarene approached to parley then how could they bribe or threaten her—Irene would not answer even if she could.

Later, Irene’s interrogators returned with a simple white mask. The one who bore it then twirled the mask around so that the inside faced Irene, and then she could see the thorns. She tried to twist away from it as they approached.

“Say no, and we shall desist,” said Irene’s captor. She shook her head no but couldn’t form the words, and she began to struggle and scream as the hands of the stars grasped her head and turned her face forward.

Say the word, they said. This is the way it’s done, is it not? We have given you the chance to say no.

“That is a wise choice,” another masked star replied, even though Irene had made no such thing as a choice. The star continued, “You shall sing the songs of the spheres, as we all do, and that shall be your voice.”

Irene’s shouts became muffled as the mask covered her face, the thorns inside lancing through to her mind. She only thought the blue aurora had been exhaustive. The mask hungered for her life, her heart, her name. The substance of the mask shone with rainbows as it fed and came to life, blurring all the colors into a stark and blazing white.

 

* * *

 

The vacuum began to ease from the survivors of the twelfth ship, and Sham faded into their view.

“You should be proud of yourselves,” their torturer said of them, the survivors: Lily Bell, Sorrow, and Guile. “This ordeal proved you to be the truest of stars.”

Lily Bell trembled as she stood from the cell block, and she struck the stardust from her hands. Who did the stardust used to be? She tried not to think about it. “Your ordeal was ill-designed. I am no star at all.”

Sham gasped in wonder, for her voice carried the songs of the spheres with a dissonance with which no true star would speak. “You’re Lily Bell of the West! Why do you look normal?” By this, the star meant, ‘why do you appear like a star?’ “How could you have survived the vacuum?”

Sorrow rasped, “What nerve to ask.”

“The Firmament served as my quarantine,” Lily Bell explained, ignoring the eldest star. “That which make the race of the stars is an illness in the West, for the star named Jealousy fed on all light and life in my homeland. That was how he survived, and how I survived just now.” She leaned against the prison bars. “But that’s not your curiosity, is it?”

Guile, who barely had enough life to stand or speak, whispered, “Lily, what are you doing?”

Though her insides twisted at the unspoken answer and her skin flinched at the proximity, Lily Bell reached out to pull Sham to her for a kiss. When they parted, and Lily Bell judged the look on Sham’s face as one who had mistaken desperation for passion, she said: “Free me from this prison and I will lead you to the West.”

Sham paused and glanced behind her, at the ground. “If I leave, they’ll send someone else to do the same to your fellows.”

Sorrow and Guile could barely move themselves. Lily Bell replied, “We stole life from each other, or tried. I want nothing to do with them. Only one with the power to destroy me can protect me—I only want the strong in my life.”

Sham shrugged and smiled, almost preening at the compliment, although Lily Bell’s argument sounded too reasonable and obvious to the star to take excessive pride in it: mere validation would do.

And so it went, that Lily Bell escaped from the prison of the stars and fell upon the Firmament—with the star named Sham, and the key to the West.

 

* * *

 

The Dierne, the Azure Laetha, and the Clarene hovered in an area of the sky that the Dierne promised would be neutral territory. At last, an envoy of the stars began to drift down a distant path to meet them.

“Masked,” the Clarene muttered, disapprovingly. “Who told them they were allowed to wear masks?”

Azure Laetha moved forward and spoke to the envoy. “Is this truly a safe space to parlay?”

“That must go without question,” replied the envoy.

The Dierne laughed without humor. “You violated the terms of agreement concerning the Firmament! Excuse us, then, for coming to this neutral space fully armed and with all the powers of the West awaiting our signal to attack.”

The envoy said, “The West is an ephemeral mote of aberrance in a grand cosmos that is ordered as it should be, and has been for all time. We care nothing of your power.”

“Then you _know_ nothing of our power,” Azure said. “If you never cared to find out, then you should have left us alone. I warn you—should the Firebird rise, you won’t even have the barrier of the Sundering to protect you. The lights of our cities will wash away your constellations, and none will miss your names.”

The envoy remained silent for a long while, before speaking. “The constellations were families we only longed to keep complete. A grand cosmos, ordered as it should be. We feel the loss of the fallen, but relinquish that which we have lost all the same. Your Firmament was an opportunity—”

“A compromise!” The Dierne interrupted. “You’ve overstepped your bounds!”

“Barely any of the stars of your Firmament consented to return, why? You have poisoned them against their own home. This offense we could not bear.”

Azure Laetha lifted her chin. “Each one of them had the right to say no.”

“That is the selfish way of the West. Your definition of compromise and boundaries are too convenient for you. Only the stars know the true form of the solidarity you so often speak, and can only speak, of.”

Before the Dierne could argue, the Clarene spoke: “You forced away two of our people who were not stars. Lily Bell keeps a heart of the West within her.” She paused before adding, “The Firmament was the principality of Irene, she of the rainbows, of peace and quiet, of soothe and song—my first beloved.”

At the mention of Irene’s name, the body of the masked envoy began to jerk and writhe, as if to ward off something within. Azure and the Dierne readied their weapons.

“Irene is a terrible cook,” the Clarene added. “She would rather eat sandwich ingredients separately than ever again risk the consequences of assembling one. Irene could burn soup. I thought that was adorable. I can’t tell you why. Irene watches too much television and has developed an alcohol habit that I worry about. It’s as though she seeks refuge from the world in them, when I created the world itself as a refuge. Irene doesn’t invite herself to parties anymore, but she used to, and—in the old world—she would be easy to forgive for the way she danced and sang, because that was the way of it. We left that world for a reason.”

Azure muttered to the Dierne, “I thought they agreed to part when they relieved your duties to the principality. Why all this sentimentality?”

The Dierne shrugged and peered, sighting down the barrel as the envoy spoke again.

“Which stars… _save me_ …would you…” the envoy stilled and straightened, and calmly finished: “…trade for them?”

The younger gods exchanged glances of wary apprehension. The Clarene appeared unfazed as she said, “No trade. Neither belongs in your sky.”

With a gloved hand, the envoy pointed at the Dierne, then the hand balled into a fist and the envoy struck themselves in the face before pointing at the Dierne again. “Return,” the envoy commanded, before bringing both hands to the edges of the mask, fingers scrambling at the edges. The envoy’s voice slurred, growling dangerously: “Return Pal…lierne…Dallis…return… _help_ …must return…to us…”

At last, the envoy wrenched their own mask free, revealing a face of deep open wounds that was Irene’s. The Clarene moved forward to hold the princess as she cast aside the mask of thorn and white fire. The god-king pressed her lips to the wounds until they healed and tears washed the blood from Irene’s face.

But the princess continued to cry out and make gestures of urgency until Azure unrolled a substitute interweave from her sleeve.

In this manner, she was able to warn the others of the knowledge she had stolen (or whatever it should be called, when the myriad minds of the stars had been forced upon her.) A star named Sham had fallen, accompanied by a prisoner from the Firmament that was not a star. It must have been Lily Bell, Irene knew, and also knew that Lily Bell possessed the key to the West.

The Clarene interrupted Irene’s profuse apologies with, “Good. Now we can all go home.”

And the Dierne objected. “The stars from the Firmament aren’t home. I came here to fight for them, too!”

“With whose armies?” The Clarene asked.

And Azure Laetha answered, “Holy Mother, the Firebird is with the Dierne.”

“This is mutiny,” the Clarene said, but did not appear to Irene to truly be outraged. In any case, the King returned home with the princess.


	2. Searching Deserts and Wastelands

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Snuck a mini-myth in this chapter about the first moment of antagonism between the Laetha and the Ophelia. While it might come off as a petty thing that the gods must be much bigger than, my headcanon of the Ophelia becomes significantly relatable as a goddess of depression, so the effects of that (essentially, how it eats up time out of a depressed person's life—mine among others— _and_ the time of people who were counting on that person to do something healthier) was cathartic to explore...even as the real-life manifestation _suuucks_. 
> 
> The pathology and politics of (if we can call it) neurodiversity becomes, I hope, more ambivalent in later chapters, because I'm ambivalent myself about mythologizing the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to a one-to-one correspondence. So, the treatment of white starfire isn't as exactly allegorical.

Under the reign of the Ophelia, the Firmament cast a glaucous gray-blue hue over the sandy and arid plains of Western Faery, and over the jostle of wood-plank buildings on unpaved streets that made the town.

Irene found a tea salon that did not serve tea and was spelled like ‘saloon’. A dart board hung on the wall beside the drinks bar, and a fae shot at the dartboard with her gun. Otherwise, the venue was empty, like the town.

Irene reached out and typed in the air, “You must be Lyra.” A voice like an Aletheia android spoke the words aloud.

“Must? I don’t have to if I don’t want to be.” Lyra flipped her firearm until it spun, then holstered it. She turned to Irene and looked her up and down. “Who are you?”

“A bounty hunter—at least, I want to be,” Irene replied. “I could use the skills of an expert.” She drew a rolled-up Wanted poster from her sleeve and handed it to Lyra.

Lyra unrolled the poster, read it, and whistled. “A star, eh? I can’t abide the best of them.”

“You’ll help me, then.”

The hunter raised an eyebrow at the princess, crumpled the paper, and threw it out the window of the saloon to join the tumbleweed. “You had one job, to keep the stars out of the West. I don’t pick up after anybody else’s messes.” She strode to the bar, on which she’d left her cowboy hat, and added as she donned it, “’Sides, I only ride with self-rescuing princesses.”

Irene had left the saloon, and had walked halfway to the train station by the time Lyra caught up and clapped her on the shoulder.

“I was just making sure I wasn’t getting drafted!” Lyra told her. “My troupe’s become the Ophelia’s troops, what with the war over the Firmament—leaving me bored out of my mind here.”

Irene made an effort to stop the surprise from showing on her face as she managed to reply, “How fortunate for me that you hadn’t enlisted yourself.”

“I’m a hunter, not a soldier—especially not for her.” The wistful distance of her voice barely eclipsed the bitterness. Seeming to realize this, Lyra changed the subject, shifting her manner to one of insouciant warmth. “You weren’t stung, were you? ‘Cause you’ll want thicker skin than that around me. And do you even know where to start looking?”

 

* * *

 

The Waste was the fastest-growing territory in the West, in part because of their wartime economy, and for the most part because of who now occupied the throne. The Clarene had granted the Ophelia absolute sovereignty before rocketing away to negotiate with the stars, and this continued even after the Clarene’s return. Lyra made a wry observation that this could not have been due to the Ophelia’s usurpation, which Irene knew to be true. When the Clarene declined to take back her position, the Ophelia had sanctioned the Dierne’s war against the stars.

Such decisions wrought great personal costs. The Ophelia would be weighed every moment with the possibility that she sent her adopted daughter to her doom, and the most prominent public figure to remain at her side through her reign would be the Arrise Laetha. (The Laetha was to the Ophelia what stars were to Lyra. The Ophelia could not abide the best of them.)

Lyra and Irene sat across from one another in the booth of the dining car. The train clattered over the rails to the Waste.

“I know why the Ophelia and I don't get along," Lyra mused. "Why don't the Ophelia and the Firebird?" "I'm sure that's equally personal," Irene replied, trying not to wonder why the Ophelia would recommend Lyra to her or this quest. “You’ve done some awful things in the Ophelia’s defense, I've heard." "I may have heard the same of you." "The most I can say for the Firebird is if they were boss of us, I’d be on the plains and right at home. Not looking forward to soaking my boots through with floodwater, you know…”

Because their journey would take a long while still, Irene shared a memory of her own with Lyra that would answer the question.

***

_Arabella had gone to the Ophelia’s lake house at the recommendation of the stars. She was only Arabella then: human, mortal, and singular. Irene had her tongue back then, and hair so long that it flowed past her ankles like a river, and it was this Irene who met that Arabella. The mortal told the faery princess that she sought a way back to the human world._

_And Irene directed Arabella back to the city, to the stars, for the Ophelia lay in dolorous stillness and could not show them the way to the world of the humans._

_Time passed, and Arabella returned again with the same request, and Irene remembered how shy and deferential Arabella had seemed. Irene had mistaken it for gentleness, and would regret it. As the Ophelia remained afflicted, Irene accompanied Arabella to the city and observed that the mortal had found a sort of family with the stars named Jealousy and Fear._

_By the third time Arabella returned to the lake house, the Ophelia had begun to flow water-clear and cool and with a soothing rhythmic babbling. She led Arabella to the eddy in the river, and the Ophelia warning the human girl not to step through until they had seen enough._

_Irene had only glimpsed the human world only once before, so with their leave she followed them, and so she bore witness to the first of their battles._

_The Ophelia would not let Arabella out of Western Faery—not without first saying to the human what the Faery Queen knew by instinct. Time in the world of humans had passed, far too swiftly for passage to be safe. Were Arabella to enter the human world, all the centuries that Arabella had missed would take to her mortal body and decay it._

_And Arabella wept, and shouted that this should not be, for the god of time must know how to take back all the moments lost._

_Irene had since come to learn that even the Ophelia could not do such a thing for herself, and it was in those episodes of frozen misery that the streams of time would flow however they would._

***

Lyra seethed between her teeth, an expression of doubt. “Was that it? Arabella made that little ruckus, and a god’s had it out for every piece of her ever since?"

“It’s more complicated than that.” Irene paused, then elaborated, “I shouldn’t have gotten between them.” Arabella had made it to the banks of the river, and saved herself from drowning. Irene made a foolish plea to the Ophelia on the mortal’s behalf, that, with the faery princess having spent some time with Arabella and the stars, Irene knew how they spoke with one another—and that the same fervor wasn’t as cruel between the three of them, somehow.

It had been cruel, but she thought it hadn’t been. _Here's to holding the consequences of our deeds and failings._

As this was no elaboration at all, and the hunter had grown bored with the way Irene seemed to stare a thousand yards ahead of her but only see inward, Lyra muttered, “Woulda, coulda. Do you hear a hungry giant?”

A deep rumble sounded across the dusty blue-gray plains. Out the window of their train, both could see a mist flowing over the rocks and cacti.

The ceiling of the train cart dented with a metallic thud as something—or somebody—fell upon it. The metal began to warp and glow orange.

“Train heist?” Irene guessed, and then she drew her gun.

“It’s wartime, princess,” Lyra reminded her, already standing from the train cart with her own gun drawn. “We’re allowed to worry bigger.” She caught the train steward’s eye and, with a nudge of her head, directed the evacuation of the other passengers to the adjacent train car.

All but the two of them had hurried away by the time the molten metal burst, and a figure—swathed in a red hooded cape—dropped from the ceiling.

Lyra fired.

The red figure flowed and darted like flames, brilliant red even in the misty gray-blue light, and swift as a serpent. With a spin that was half a cartwheel and half a roundhouse kick, Lyra’s opponent disarmed her, then gave a shove that sent Lyra sprawled on the ground of the train. The hunter struggled to draw breath.

Irene had holstered her gun and typed hastily in the air until the Aletheia’s voice spoke her message. “It’s the Oracle of Laetha. Don’t shoot.”

The figure stepped back and lowered her hood with one had, with the other she flicked back stray wisps of her own red hair from the mark on her forehead.

Lyra wheezed, “Althea Altair? What?”

The Oracle nodded an affirmative. “Missed the train. Rode the Thunderhorse. Well met, your royal highness and noble hunter.”

With a wary look at the Oracle, Lyra stumbled to where her gun had fallen, and holstered it. Irene typed something out again, then jabbed at the air with a frown.

Out the window, the desert plains had turned into bleakly stagnant waterscapes. Althea remarked, “I could not, in good conscience, return a blue Thunderhorse to our Holy Mother’s stable. That was why I boarded the train. Doubtless, the Waste corrodes the signals of your communicator.”

Irene slouched back in her seat with an expression of stern malcontentedness.

"You've woven worlds out of rainbows. Are words much more difficult?"

Irene made no reply.

*

Once Lyra had caught her breath, and the food they ordered finally arrived at their booth table, the hunter voiced some objections.

“This ain’t a quest for children,” Lyra grumbled to the Oracle. “You knew we were gonna be searching the Waste, or the Waste is taking over everything else so fast that it’ll be searching us if we don’t hurry. Either way, let me tell you, it’s a far cry from the Laetha’s gold temples…”

Irene seemed to have lost her appetite. Althea crunched the taro chips from beside Irene’s club sandwich, and said, “You’re hunting down Sham. I’m in search of Lily Bell. We’re most likely to find them together.”

“Your twin could be dead.”

“She keeps my heart in her chest. If she were dead, I would know it. That you would lead me to her is not even a request, it’s a hope.”

Lyra sighed. "You _could_ take your prayers to the temple that you keep saying you'll never leave, instead of going around—making it like people don't mean it when they say no." 

At that, Irene burst out laughing. She bent over double with a sudden force that knocked her head against the table by accident, and she repeated this with her fists and palms a few more times on purpose.

When her paroxysms had calmed, Lyra raised an eyebrow at Irene, who made a gesture of assent.

Lyra braced one hand against the table and hauled herself to standing. "I'm not sharing my bunk just because we're sidekicks. Your spurs could leave me snoring fireballs." With the other hand, she rubbed at her chest as though to soothe some pain. 

Althea gave a tight-lipped smile and answered, "Perhaps I'm an asset in battle." 

"You'd better be." With that, Lyra left. 

And the train continued to stream and steam through the wasteland.

 

* * *

 

The expansion of the Waste had confused the migration patterns of the selfish. The selfish were faery creatures, aquatic marsupials that were something like sole fish and something like eel. They took that which was most needed by other people, and kept it in their pouches out of habit.

They were fished to near-extinction in one afternoon, as Lyra took up a flensing knife and tore through their bellies, while Irene and Althea searched their pouches for the Firmament’s key to the West. It was all slimy, smelly work in the best circumstances; and these were the ponds of the Waste, which was indeed full of waste.

Irene found the key in the pouch of a selfish that had a tag attached to its fin. Lyra made note of the tag number, and they journeyed to the slums to find records of where that selfish individual had been captured and studied before.

The bookkeepers had abandoned their post and left their records. In the books of that tower, Althea found records of the selfish’s capture that coincided with the window of time in which Sham would have come into the West. Lyra, far more swiftly, led the search for the star from that location, where Sham and Lily Bell had crashed into the West.

Their journey led them inland, away from the waters. In the shadow of the watchtower, lean-to shacks sheltered crowds of people as they died the slowest and numbest of deaths. The air reeked worse than the pond of selfish gutted carcasses. This was not the home of those who lived within their means, though their means be little. This part of the Waste served as a communal grave for those who lost face and faith, whose minds even collectively were worth less to mind than a bad penny, whose two cents were nonsense, and whose very names were filthier than mud.

Lyra had little patience for it. “This place gives me the heebies,” she blurted to her two companions. “It was just like this before the war, so there’s no excuse. This is _the West_. If they live like this, it’s ’cause they _want to_.”

Through the drab gray dashed a figure in blue—of the same make of Althea’s hooded cape, but with patches of threadbare tatters—and, curious, Althea went in pursuit.

*

Lyra and Irene followed the Oracle to a cluster of a dozen figures swathed in blue, and one godlike figure who bore a familiar-looking sword.

“What’s the Ophelene be doing in these parts?” Lyra wondered aloud. The god glanced up at her voice but didn’t answer. Irene wondered how the sight of a mere spirit could take the great god’s tongue.

Althea knelt down to pull away a shroud that lay on the ground in the middle of the circle of people. Beneath the shroud lay the body of an elderly woman.

As Lyra approached, Althea rose and reported, “The cause of death was an excessive amount of star fire.”

“Any amount in our home is too much,” Lyra said. Irene dawdled at the corner, turning over a half-singed cardboard panel that bore the words ‘Keep Your Money. I Want Change.’

The god gave a doubtful hum. “The most beloved of the gods shines with the same fire.”

“I did need reminding,” Lyra acknowledged, “Seeing as we're not normally on the trail of _the Dierne’s_ murdering spree. Nobody followed the trail from here?”

Answered the god, “None here but you could do such a thing.”

“Wait a moment,” Althea said, and she whistled for Irene’s attention as well, as she drew forth four guns, one by one, from the holsters sewn onto her cape. “Most of our ordinary ammunition has no effect on the stars,” she said, as she exchanged one of her guns for Lyra’s, then Irene’s, and then handed one to the god that Lyra had called Ophelene.

Lyra set off, leading the other four behind her. When the trail reached the tower, she signaled the three others to spread out and enter through the other gated ways. The one she called Ophelene made for Lyra’s left, and Althea and Irene spread out to the right.

Althea remarked, “You didn’t take Granny Wednesday’s sign with you.”

Irene peered at the Oracle with something like confused annoyance.

“You mentioned her in writing a few times, I remember—between your quest for the Laetha and your grief after three’s spontaneous combustion. It’s not that I recommend you becoming bedridden with paralytic misery for a month and a half, like last time—”

Irene interrupted with a groaning sigh and an expression of certain annoyance.

“—but I should hope you haven’t gone through too much to cease caring for anything,” Althea finished, not even raising her voice to be heard. “The Irene who redeemed herself to the Firebird would have shed a tear.”

After a pause, Irene impatiently gestured to the entrance that they had arrived at, then nudged her head to demonstrate her insistence that Althea take to her post.

“What, you won’t even camouflage us?”

The faery princess raised a hand to show a blaze of white fire, and her arm shook with the effort to turn the white flames blue, or red, or anything in between. The white flames twirled the colors into one again. She had lost her ability to weave the rainbows ever since the stars masked her.

Althea jogged away, to the fourth entrance of the tower. As she approached, the figure in blue—perhaps the same one she followed to the body of Grandmother Wednesday—leapt from a standing position outside the gate and onto the arch, then began to climb the outside of the tower. If there were no footholds, the figure made them as she clawed and climbed.

This tower would not stand very stable, then, which would perhaps have explained why the folk of the Waste sheltered themselves in lean-tos around the tower instead. No, that didn’t explain it. Althea took the compass from the chain around her neck and pressed it to her forehead, mouth, and breast—for luck, or for focus—and she made her way through the entrance and up the stairway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't set out to write Lyra as an outright jerk so much as that she and the Ophelia would have had incompatibilities that mutual attraction couldn't overcome. Lyra's rejection of what her beloved river god made of their daughter, Mallory, could be one manifestation of that.
> 
> One story I want to sneak in on a future edit is Irene's entrance to the West, in which Granny Wednesday of the Waste would have been one of the princess's earliest friends and guides.


	3. Birth of Alynah Blake

Althea found Lily Bell first, standing in the center of the lowest balcony—more like a cliff, for most of the railing had rotted away. The Oracle’s twin embraced the star Sham in her arms, then let his body slump to the floor.

Lily Bell ran her tongue over her bloodied fangs. “I had to hurry,” she called to Althea. “In case you stopped me. Oh.” She put a hand at the spot between her chest and stomach. “I felt that, sinking. Your heart.”

“What do you mean?” Althea approached her. “What do you mean by stop you? I was trying to save you.” Sham caught at her ankle as she passed, and Althea turned in surprise and fired with her gun until the star was still.

“The damage is done.” Lily Bell said this with a contemptuous laugh that Althea never heard from her before. This transformed, treacherous Lily Bell kicked over Sham’s body. “You really thought I loved you! You, who played every part in our capture, our imprisonment—you turned us against each other, and sapped us of life! I just wish there was more time.” The other three caught up and crowded at the balcony entrance as Lily Bell continued to speak. “Over days, I swore, the West would dim that life—leave worse than star dust, and then, only then, would I know we were safe!”

Lyra balked. “You planned that? It wasn’t that you couldn’t have given the slip at the Firmament, and cozy up back home here all safe—” 

Lily Bell screamed, _“Sham deserves so much worse than that!”_

The Ophelene—that is, the god that Lyra called Ophelene—argued, “But I could have held Sham answerable to what you suffered. What this means now is that you’re complicit in the death of Grandmother Wednesday.”

“No,” Lily Bell said, “Not complicit. I killed her myself. Althea, your heart is freezing my blood.”

Althea grit her teeth. “I don’t believe it.”

“Granny told me there was nothing wrong with Sham that she could see, no light inside that was dimming. I got angry—I’m still angry, I can’t be sorry.” Lily Bell looked to the god. “I’m not sorry, Auntie. You can kill me for that, but if I took Sham with me then it would all have been worth it.”

“Auntie?” Lyra echoed.

Lily Bell raised her arms in surrender. “What are you waiting for? What are you all waiting for?”

“Not what,” the god answered, “Who.”

A flash of blue darted up from the edge of the cliff and skated towards Lily Bell.

Althea gave a shout as a fist and arm exploded from her twin’s chest. The hand clutched a palpitating heart, and it shed globs of black tarry ink and black shreds of pericardium until its red surface could be seen.

The one whose arm it was that scraped the darkness from Althea’s heart then stepped back, and the cliff split between Lily Bell and the figure in blue.

Althea bolted for where Lily Bell stood, wounded front and back, seeming about to faint over the edge of the cliff that had come so perilously near.

Between Althea and Lily Bell, the darkness coalesced into hooves and a tail like a giant's paintbrush, a head of long and stiff ears and a single spiraling horn, and in-between and all something…no, some _one_ …entirely different and herself. 

She stood, and Althea to skid to a halt, and their eyes met.

“Hi, mom,” said the dark figure. When Althea only stared, the newborn turned until she faced Lily Bell and said the same. “Hi, mom—” but this time, she punctuated it with a shove that sent Lily Bell tumbling off the edge of the cliff. 

The new being leapt aside, to the last remaining section of balcony railing, and then leapt up and up, hopping over the exterior of the decaying tower with breathtaking sure-footedness—especially considering that both Irene and Lyra had drawn their guns and taken to firing shots that the figure dodged effortlessly.

At the same moment, Althea surged forward to catch at Lily Bell but slipped, falling with her twin until they both crashed onto the ground below.

The god leapt after them, instead breaking like sea spray in mid-air and falling like rain.

Breathing hard, Lyra lowered her gun and looked from the horizon to the peak. She wheezed, sardonically, "We were a lot of help!"

Irene holstered her own gun and pointed at where Sham lay. Their mission was technically accomplished. The princess reached into her back pocket for a plastic card, which she offered to Lyra. It glinted with holograms.

"If you're paying me," Lyra cautioned, "You're not supposed to give me this whole thing." 

Irene looked mildly confused for a moment, shrugged in the next, and nudge-fanned the air until the hunter accepted. The princess peered at the line of buildings where the mysterious being continued her way, spread her arms and grew into a giant white bird with a single yellow crest. The bird hopped off the balcony and glided towards Alynah.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My headcanon was that Mallory was more of a midwife than a mother to Alynah Blake necessarily. Still, being born of two Calamities of the West would probably explain a lot...I'm beginning to feel that _this_ Lilibell is quite the unsung calamity herself, and have wanted to embrace and rock her like a pillow since the first chapter. The worst is over! Epilogues full of dialogues, coming up!


	4. Epilogues: Althea Altair

Lily Bell awoke in a bed of bayhop flowers. The snore of the ocean tide filled the air, and the sky above her was black, with a scattering of stars that gave her a powerful pang of fright.

“Don’t look at them, look at me,” thrummed a cracked, elderly voice. Lily Bell turned to see a face, aglow with distant bonfire light, and lined with the shadows of numerous wrinkles. The eyes were familiar, blank and expressionless. On her forehead was a faded mark.

“I remember falling,” Lily Bell said, faintly.

“We didn’t fall from very high, but it was falling into the Waste that broke us,” Althea said. “Merely wandering into the Waste would has broken many a spirit. But we could endure it—you, me…Irene, Lyra…and the Ophelia.”

“So the god whisked us away to a place of healing. Of course she did. We’re very important people.” Lily Bell gave a faint, but distinctly cold and cruel laugh. 

“You took longer to heal. You were ill, not only injured.”

“How much longer? I’m feeling very well now, but you’re _old_.”

“As soon as I could move again, I went out alone in search of Mallory. She tore our heart from your chest. I took our heart back, and she aged me at her touch. I’m curious about dying of old age, so the Firebird will allow it, and reform my spirit into a new baby when this life of mine is done. Meanwhile, I thought you could keep this heart—”

Lily Bell laughed even louder when she Althea offer it. “Hiding away in your temple again. I wonder if the Ophelia would return my heart, not having granted my wish that you be less embarrassingly pathetic. The Firebird makes you think you can have a new start, but our mother will always hate us—and you’re the one who will never know why.”

Althea kept the heart in her reticule and stood to leave. “I’ll forgive you for that because I know you’re ill.”

“Forgiveness is so condescending. I’d never do that to you.”


	5. Epilogues: Lyra

Much later, Lyra approached the bayhops and said, “Mind if I sit by you a while?”

“Do I have a choice?” Lily Bell asked, trying to raise an arm where the bayhop vines had grown and twined.

“I ain’t got any personal objection to acting as if everyone does.”

“Fine. Sit. Who are you?”

Lyra introduced herself, and with little prompting began to talk of numerous other matters. Althea Altair had given them all stun guns when they thought they would be hunting Sham to death, though Lyra herself suspected that the Oracle was protecting Lily Bell. It had been the moment ‘the Ophelene’ took Althea’s stun gun that Lyra knew that she was the Ophelia in disguise, because anything the Ophelene touched with her sword arm would then turn into a sword, which was bound to get someone hurt one day that the Ophelene wouldn’t mean to hurt. Meanwhile, Arrise Laetha reigned over the West beside the-Ophelene-diguised-as-the-Ophelia.

Suddenly, Lily Bell asked the hunter, “Why are you here?”

Lyra shrugged. “Why are _you_ here?”

“They decided I was ill.” Lily Bell frowned. “For the same reason they decided I was holy, funnily enough. You say that my own sister expected you and Princess Irene would try to kill me, or need to try. It's gotten this bad. I had a voice that brought death to contentedness. Eventually, I realized that contentedness is never truly alive. Is that evil, of itself?”

“Well...you decided to bring death to all kinds of contentedness, not just the ones that stifled people.”

“There are no ‘kinds’ of contentedness. Any moments of certainty or assurance are like Irene’s mirages. Everybody tries to bring some sort of death to it, whenever they find it shining off from someone else. Sometimes they don’t even need to try, it’s that delicate.” Lily Bell said, “This world doesn’t need me. It doesn’t need any of us, and maybe that’s why…everyone in every world that can fight to tear everybody else down, does. We’re all in something like Sham’s torture chamber, all the time.”

Lyra listened, and exhaled between her teeth, too long to be a scoff and not at all like a whistle. “You haven’t heard, then. The war’s over. That reminds me, I’ve got to get back into town—my troupe’s coming back from the front lines. Nice chatting with you.”

“Liar.”

“No, really. It made me think. You know, I don’t believe you can make anybody that miserable any more than you can make them happy. I’ve wanted to tell her that.”

“Her, who?”

“The Ophelia, of course!” Lyra exclaimed, and called pointedly across the dunes: “Once she quits sneaking around in some other god’s costume! And sending go-betweens to lead me to her! What’s it going to take to have a real conversation?”

Lily Bell tried to clap her hands over her ears, but settled instead for a groan of, “Lyra, was it?”

“Yeah.”

“Lyra, please...get away from me...the Ophelia doesn’t go here.”

The hunter left a bunch of green grapes on the bayhops.


	6. Epilogues: Adilene

The next group of visitors were the Ophelia, the Laethelia, the Dierne, the Clarene, and Adilene. Like every time the Ophelia visited, it was during the crest of the starfire’s effects on Lily Bell—something like a fever, but not at all like a fever, that left Lily Bell grasping at steaming wisps of memories.

In reply to the Laethelia’s oceanic call about “…treatment…effectiveness…” the Dierne’s voice murmured, “Maybe she also needs to be reminded of the best she can be.”

“Her life was my gift,” the Clarene said.

And it was Adeline who replied, firmly, “That’s long past. I don’t know what Princess Irene told you, but as far as I’m concerned, Lily Bell should decide on her own what sort of person she is—and will be.”

Through the feverish haze, Lily Bell managed to argue, “Althea was the one you cherished, mother. I was forced upon you.”

Adeline sighed. “Excuses.”

“Truths,” Lily Bell said, before the haze coalesced into something like a slumber.

The Clarene added, “Not one that matters at the moment, even if it were a fact.”

“Then why would she be so moved to mention it?” The Dierne wondered. “Obviously, it’s part of making sense of what she’s been through…”

“I’ll have no part in that,” Adilene said, coolly. “I’m fae, I don’t _make_ sense.”

The Laethelia hissed to hush them.


	7. Epilogues: Irene

When Lily Bell recovered enough to snap the vines from her arms and ankles, Irene approached for a visit.

Lily Bell asked her, “Will the skies never be bright blue again?”

Irene removed a glove from her hand and showed the blaze of starfire that jutted like fingernails—without the gloves, she could no longer hide it.

“Then you have the same illness that I have. Did it take when they gave you a voice?” 

And Irene reached out and typed, “Maybe I’ve always had it, as I told the Clarene. The real reason we parted was that I felt in competition with her, in a way I could never win. I needed to stay away because I needed her, and the way she coaxed me out from under the mask of the stars only proved that.”

“You never stopped trying to protect her, even up on the Firmament. How does it feel to have failed your only job?”

“Surprised.”

“But you knew that you couldn’t do it.”

“I didn’t know that the Clarene didn’t care. The most loving thing I could have done was to tell her that she was wrong, and it was the Ophelia who did—so, the Firmament is now open to the sky, and the surviving rescuees of the Dierne’s war who wish to settle in the West are invited to do so.”

“What about the star I fell with? Lyra told me that Althea only used a stun gun.”

“Sham was willing to adjust to life in the West—”

“No,” Lily Bell interrupted. “I won’t share a world with Sham. I refuse to! Just kill me!”

“Let me finish,” Irene said to her. “I know many things that cannot be undone. What you suffered in the prison of the stars is one. Sham’s death at the hands of your daughter is another.”

Lily Bell relaxed. “But Sorrow,” she said, “And Grandmother Wednesday.”

“Thank you for remembering Granny Wednesday. It’s more than I’ve done. You should have this instead of me,” Irene said, and she laid the plane of cardboard beside the bayhops. Then she left.

It can’t have been the same sign that Wednesday had held as she stood or sat at the corner, so Lily Bell thought, because the words had changed. Now it bore the words: ‘The moment we abandon all hope is when the real work begins—that of finding any spark in such desolation.’ 

Which was much less catchy, but Lily Bell decided against consigning the cardboard to the bonfire.


	8. Epilogues: Althea Altair, Again

Lily Bell walked down the Laethelia’s shores for a while, and when she returned to the bayhops, she found the elderly Althea sitting by the bonfire. The Oracle turned over a piece of cardboard in her own wrinkled hands, that this time bore the words: _Age is an affliction for which only maturity is the cure._

“You’re back,” she said.

“You’re better,” Althea replied.

“How are you feeling? I didn’t ask last time. I’m sor—” she stopped herself, “No. I can’t say that, because if I promise to control myself when the starfire rises again I’ll just break that promise.”

“Is it so bad? What is that like?”

Lily sat herself by the bonfire and answered, glumly, “Everything becomes so clear and simple. It isn’t until it’s too late that I’ve seen the mess I’ve made. And then I don’t want to see it, because there’s nothing I can do for the past or the future—even though I’ve _done_ all...that.”

“The world has room for you. A kind, wise someone said the same of me once.”

With dry irony, Lily Bell replied, “You’re a fine judge of character.”

Althea Altair offered her heart to Lily Bell again.

“Keep it,” Lily Bell said to her. “Haven’t you noticed that I don’t take good care of it?”

“Maybe my heart took care of you.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Then I won’t offer it a third time until you ask.”

What Lily Bell did ask then was, "Why won't you keep it in your chest?" 

"I don't know how you can bear it nudging your lung," Althea replied. "Like a reminder you never need. 'You have a lung.' I already know, and yet a heartbeat later: 'You have a lung. You have a lung.' When I'm near you, it's worse. 'Lung _lung_ lung _lung_ lung _lung_.' I'm too old for this!" 

"We're the same age," Lily Bell reminded her. After a pause, she realized that she had reminded herself. "Why didn't you tell me that I was wrong about...which one of us it was?" 

"It doesn't matter which one of us it was." 

"You're so sure." 

"I'll _make_ sure. No matter who else tells you what or who you are, you're Lily Bell to me." 

The heartless two sat side-by-side, holding hands, on the shore between the bonfire and the ocean waters, and the star-filled sky above them.


End file.
